Inverted Capacity Extended Engineering Experiment (ICE3)

High Speed Broadband

The primary thrust behind the ICE3 project is the idea that capacity
over the last-mile will exceed or equal the capacity available in the
network core. We could term this type of access network as High-Speed
Broadband as opposed to conventional Broadband.

Higher bandwidth access links are becoming common place in many parts of the
world, and have become a key future platform in Australia as part of the
NBN project.

The Australian National Broadband Network

The Australian National Broadband Network
(NBN) is a government funded network infrastructure project to provide
high-speed Broadband access to all Australians. Due to the nature of the
Australian landscape, with a small number of densely populated areas and very
large sparsely populated areas, access will be provided via a number of
technologies.

Fibre - Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) access will be provided in the
more densely populated regions. This will encompass approximately 93% of
Australian premises

Wireless - Smaller regional areas will be catered for with
wireless technologies

Satellite - Some remote locations in Australia will be provided
with Satellite access

The primary goal is to provide broadband access at equal pricing points for all
users. The NBN will provide Layer 2 connectivity to end-user premises, Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) will then sell Internet access to the end-users. Each
user will be able to access multiple service providers for different purposes,
including phone, television and other streaming services.

While it is expected that many end-users will choose to connect to the NBN at
rates of 12-25Mbps, the network will allow for up to 100Mbps dedicated bandwidth
to each premises within the Fibre network. Future developments promise to provide
connections with up to 1Gbps to the customer.

What does this mean for ICE3

With the provision of high-speed broadband access planned to be made to a large
proportion (~93%) of the Australian population, the technology to enable an
inverting of the capacity hierarchy will come online in the near future. We will
begin to see the effects on the network of increased number of users utilising
increased access bandwidths, and whether this will change both user behaviour
or the suite of applications utilised on the Internet.

All of a sudden, particularly as the number of connected users increase, the
capacity of core links - both within Australia and those connecting Australia
to the rest of the world - could rise to the point where contention becomes a
problem.

The design of the NBN will allow ISPs to connect via multiple (up to 121) Points of
Interconnect and may allow for ISPs to site content caching systems closer
to their end-users. Similarly, we may see larger premises of traditional citizen
public services (such as Libraries, Town Halls, etc.) provide data caching
facilities to improve perceived access speeds for local citizens.

The exact impact of this change on the performance of networked applications
cannot currently be properly quantified. Estimates typically have to extrapolate
data from lower-speed Broadband access, or simulate outcomes. The rollout of the
NBN will allow for more experimental - real-world - data to be gathered to better
analyse network behaviour under these changed circumstances.